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Anand, Intel said 3 out of 5, you said one magic device, I think they have one sorted out ... NOKIA is a company needing revolution and this partnership is Nokia's hope for smart phone market.

Also outside US and to some extent Europe Nokia has a very strong foot hold, combined with essentially free software such as MeeGo the road looks good, only IF and a big if, they can deliver on software front.Reply

“…NOKIA is a company needing revolution and this partnership is Nokia's hope for smart phone market.”

Only problem: Nokia needs a polished solution fast—its average sales price is imploding and the shareholders are restless. A solution that would require them to throw away all the development work to date would be suicidal.

If it takes 12-24 months to implement a totally new architecture, with new software (seems a bit optimistic), only a smartphone maker whose roadmap is in great shape today can afford to make the switch; that'd be Apple. But they have just bulked up with PA Semi and Intrinsity; it'd be hard to imagine much Intel Inside.

Not to mention that Intel's i-series CPUs seem to have been designed to derail Apple's plans of running with a graphics-centric, well-supported CPU. The extra silicon & design time seems to have kept the i3 out of Apple's 13" notebook, while the 15" and 17" have just-a-bit-rocky auto-switch technology to fire up the NVidia GPUs. It doesn't seem that Intel has exactly been courting Apple's product intentions of late.Reply

Your view point is strictly from a desktop running pixels number as high as 1900x1200 (too much for even the best IGP from nVidia or ATi/AMD), on a smartpone the graphic intensity is not nearly enough... it does not need to win on the highest FPS, it just needs to get 30 FPS or better for a fluid experience.

The graphics component should be fine, no real reason to suspect otherwise.Reply

Given the abysmal Linux support of the GMA500 I foresee a complete piece of crap again that will result in this being used in NO android phones. For me Android is the future of the cellphone and frankly what happened with Paulsbro foreshadows the complete crap that this platform will be on Android and other Linux based platforms (like WebOS). The concerns of the OP are completely justified and I had exactly the same reaction when I read the GPU is based on PowerVR like the piece of crap GMA500.

Intel cannot succeed in the Phone space if Linux is treated with the same disdain they presented with GMA500.Reply

This is the same GPU used in almost every other smart phone on the market, except that it's designed to be clocked up to twice as fast. It's not going to run Crysis *rolls eyes* but it's more than capable of doing everything a smart phone/internet tablet will need to do.Reply

exactly. without open source drivers for the graphic any development of meego outside of intel will never go anywhere. One of the reasons I bought my current netbook is the gma 950 has excellent open source drivers that just work.

Open source development moves fast. Closed source binaries get left behind because they can't keep up with the release schedule. The current gma 500 drivers already need a kernel several versions old as well as an old X server. How many releases is meego going to miss?Reply

I can see why Anand thinks it's an interesting product, but based on his article I don't think Intel is quite there.

The current need for 5 chips is going to be a problem no matter how Intel dresses things up, and if all phones end up looking like the design shown I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer reaction was tepid - a phone of that size is still pretty big. The video playback time is also going to be a problem when it comes to spec sheets (I doubt the real-world impact will be as huge), but OEMs like their spec sheets and consumers aren't too far off either. Just looking like it'll perform poorly there may be enough.

The other issue is the reliance on an OS. At this point it seems like no one really wants another OS. Most people around here seemed to be more relieved than concerned when Palm went under. With BlackBerryOS, IPhoneOS, Android, and WinCE, there seems to be as many OSes as the market can reasonably handle. Moblin/MeeGo may be necessary for the hardware right now, but I see no reason to expect that it's going to be properly developed for consumer use like the above OSes were. Unless Intel can land RIM/Apple, they need to get Android up to par on Moorestown and they need to do it yesterday.

Ultimately I think it's going to Medfield that's a proper ARM competitor. With fewer chips it will fit in to traditional designs, and with any luck Intel will be a node ahead of its competition on the manufacturing process. It won't solve the current OS reliance, but it'll put them in a better position than Moorestown does.Reply

Ultimately I think that most people don't care about the OS. The OS mainly matters in terms of applications available for it, and it's a pain for developers to address many OS's, but also an opportunity for new developers to carve their niche.

That said, Anand did mention that Intel is making Android available for this new platform, which should be good enough.Reply

It's much closer than expected. There were quite frequent comments that thought it wouldn't even reach 5 hour on standby! Having a lot of knowledge and doing a bit research helps of course. Glad they can be roughly on par though.

It's likely the idle power can't be achieved without optimized OSes. Even if you can run Windows on it, what's the point when you won't have the battery life for it? Windows uses too much on keeping legacy support and its too bloated for idle power under 50mW.

I'm not sold. ARM has been more efficient for a lot longer, even though it's still being made on commonly larger processes than current Intel CPUs. All smartphones are ARM anyhow, so I don't see the advantage in having x86 in this spaceReply

Agreed. Intel needs a process advantage to beat ARM with x86. (Notwithstanding the software pain of transitioning to x86). But it actually doesn't have it. They are roughly on par in this segment, Intel leading by maybe a few months.http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=225...Reply

Sorry, but Intel is ahead way more than two months. Intel's 32nm process is better from performance/power point of view than 28nm bulk processes from others. Relying on numbers such as 32nm and 28nm to figure out which one is better is like using only CPU clock frequency numbers to determine which CPU is fastest.

Oh, and since Intel's 32nm products started shipping in the beginning of this year, Intel is roughly a year ahead... maybe more.Reply

Yes and no. The 32nm shipping is the high-performance (high leakage) one used in desktop/laptop processors and also the current Atom. For a smartphone, that simply won't do.

The 45nm low-leakage process they used for Moorestown is new territory for Intel and in that respect, they are behind TSMC. While the current bulk silicon 45nm isn't faster than Intel's metal gate 45nm, it's a lot less leaky in terms of power. I would guess it'll take Intel 2 iterations or so before they have leakage down to the point of being competitive. But they have performance going for them.Reply

TSMC is stuck, and won't be able to come up with a low-power process beyond the current one for a couple of years. 40nm is in trouble, 32nm is toast. Good luck with making anything below 32nm "low power" in any sense of the word.Reply

Ok, so this should be x86 CPU. So will the "tablet version" support normal Windows 7 OS or something similar? That's my only question.. I don't expect Win 7 on smartphone, but unless we have 100% software compatibility "x86 everywhere" won't mean much to people (except to Intel).Reply

After reading, I still do not understand the idea why Apple needs to buy other Chip Maker. If Morrestown is this good, and Medfield is much better. ( Apple should know it well before hand ) why spend money.

Intel is making chips at volume much cheaper then Apple designing and making their own. Hardware CPU dont differentiate the product. Outlook and Software does.Reply

“…I still do not understand the idea why Apple needs to buy other Chip Maker. If Morrestown is this good, and Medfield is much better.”

I think you answered your own question. Apple, who probably had some inkling of Intel's plans, has been plowing ahead with proprietary silicon. They must think that for the next couple of years, anyway, they're better off with ARM-based designs, tweaked in-house and sent to whatever foundry gives them the capability they need.

Can anybody estimate the number of Atom-class chips Intel sells? The general estimates are that ARM designs go into a billion devices per year, and Apple is probably thinking that they'll move 50 or 100 million per year. Intel would appear to have a serious resource/investment challenge, in addition to the business challenge of talking people into abandoning ARM.Reply

Let me see if I get this straight... this is a x86 system. And it will NOT run standard x86 OSes or binaries?If so, the developers of this are complete idiots.

It must definitely have the ability to run normal desktop windows apps at launch - either by running a full windows OS, maybe modded to make better use of small screen and no kbd, or at least by some wine-like layer. It must run dosbox with the dynamic core.

Windows 7 for Phones is hardly an established Smartphone OS. As this chip is targeted for Smartphones, then not having support for Windows is not an issue.

Besides, why would Intel support a OS that is not optimised for their CPU when it is touted as the most powerful smartphone solution ? A non-optimised OS will make the chip look bad. If Intel supports andriod devices (plus MeeGo and Moblin) suddenly get 2x the performance, with excellent battery life then Intel's decision not to support Windows based phones could force MS to optimise their OS for use on Moorestown, otherwise Windows based devices dont have a chance.Intel have not said they will NEVER support windows devices, just that they dont at the moment cos the current iteration of Windows 7 for phones is unoptimised.

In addition, as someone who used Smartphone for use with work, I would happily deal with the inconvenience of having a slightly longer phone if I got 2x the performance for the same battery life.

No, I think he is asking for Windows 7, not Windows Phone 7. WHich I can see being useful on a tablet, but not at all on a phone. It would take so much effort to turn the standard version of Windows 7 into something usable on a phone that I would imagine if x86 does take off in smartphones Microsoft would be better off just making a completely new OS that can run windows programs.Reply

There are Moorsetown tablets running Windows 7, As long as the chipset has a PCI bus Windows 7 heck even Windows 2003 server shuld install. The smart phone do not have a PCI bus therefore you cannot install Windows 7Reply

It is not a limitation of x86. Windows needs a PCI bus to install and run. There is no PCI bus in Intel embedded systems or ARM for that matter. Having said that you can install VMware on the Linux OS and install Windows as a Virtual Machine. Some people even say hacking the firmware of the embedded hardware to fake a PCI bus so Windows would install. It could be done. Take one of those WindRiver classes on fastboot and kboot and maybe you could make it happen.Reply

I think getting 3 out of 5 will be very hard for Intel, especially Apple because that company has sunk so much of its own money into chip IP. Apple is not content with just getting the best hardware out there in ARM world but wants to actually design the chip around its own OS so I dont see them using the Atom series.Intel says Win7CE & Win8CE are both out so that leaves them in a bad place. However, Microsoft is working on a micro OS kernel inside its labs called Menlo( I am not sure about the name) which Intel could try and effectively market to. Basically in Menlo Microsoft is trying to shrink NT to super small size and footrpint.Reply

Intel offered the ability to create custom atom SOC's via TSMC fabs about a year ago. It was withdrawn due to lack of interest; but if apple was interested I'm certain they'd make it available again.Reply

People will forgive lots of things if the thing just looks HOT and works as it should. It has been a long time since I have been wowed by any of the new smartphone devices, including the iphone. It is sleek and well built but a little to chunky and roundish for my taste. However they get the style look down.Reply

Would it be possible to leverage Moorestown in a way that yields 2x the battery life with the same performance as today's top end smartphones? Most 3GS/N1 users today would rather have more battery life than HD playback ability. Unfortunately, as I think about it, I believe that the battery sucking features of the phone are the peripheral devices - wifi/3g radio, camera, display, things which are outside the scope of Moorestown.Reply

If the Z600 only support 1024x600 or higher, how come the Aava reference platform has 800x480?

And even though I think the performance is very good, Z600 is still too big to compete in the Smartphone market (3-4 chips instead of 1)? I don't see how that could work with something as small as the iPhone 4th-gen's mainboard, which is incredible tiny.

Also Intel talks about combining Lincroft and Langwell into one chip, but no official word on memory in the same package? Only Anand speculates about it.

But if they Intel can integrate at least these three chips into one package with Medfield and offer some additional improvements plus @32nm, and have actual Medfield smartphones on the shelves by the holiday season 2011, Intel can finally start to compete in the smartphone market.Reply

Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I really misunderstood this sentence:"Lincroft only supports two display interfaces: 1024 x 600 over MIPI (lower power display interface) or 1366 x 768 over LVDS (for tablets/smartbooks/netbooks)."Reply

I wonder how many transistors are there in a Cortex A9 core? Just the core nothing else. For me it seems that ARM could just double or quadruple their core count against the Intel solution while still maintaining lower transistor count. Also they could just increase the CPU clock speed, if there is a market for the more power-hungry Intel solution the there is one for the ARM also.Reply

I would imagine even less smartphone software is written for multi-core now than was for desktop when dual-core CPUs started appearing in desktops. So going beyond 2 cores at this time is probably not a great move. Plus the dual core A9 isn't out to see power consumption yet, but even at 45nm I doubt it will be much below the current 65nm single-core chips if at all, so if Intel is already competitive then ARM doesn't exactly have the power budget to add cores.Reply

That actually makes sense. Nobody is going to write multi-threaded apps for a single thread CPU. I'd imagine that the number of apps, which experience is hindered by performance, is not that great at the moment. Games, browsers, UI, database for the info stored in your device - I'm not expecting these to scale perfectly across many cores but do expect a x0% performance increase.Reply

Mooresetown has to support a desktop OS. Intel is clearly moving towards wireless computing. They are bringing wireless video. With wireless video you can turn your phone into a desktop pc instantly by adding a wireless monitor and keyboard. What is the point of moving in that direction if you're moving towards a crippled OS? (Not that windows isnt crippled, if you consider obesity a form of cripple.)

You mention twice in the article that Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. This is utter nonsense. The numbers from IDC as well as the numbers from Canalys clearly show that Nokia is the worldwide leader in the smartphone market. RIM is number 2. Apple is in the third place, the first company that produces Android devices, HTC, has the number 4 spot.

I realize that Nokia's market share in the U.S. is smaller than its global market share. However, even if we restrict ourselves to the U.S. market, RIM smartphone sales are bigger than those of Apple. They are also bigger than the sales of all Android smartphones combined.Reply

So your argument is that symbian is a bigger player in the app phone market than Apple because their *latest* phones support apps?

The "smartphone" / "app phone" semantic difference is annoying, but if we look at, say, number of applications available or downloaded, Symbian and RIM are distant third and fourth places. Likewise with app usage, even just internet browsing.

If you want to talk about smartphones as they existed in 2006, then yes, both Symbian and RIM are much bigger than Apple or Android.Reply

To clarify: I said "recent" because the first Symbian smartphones came out almost 10 years ago--of course, those weren't app-centric.

My original comment on Anand's article still stands. I'm talking about IDC's and Canalys' reports on 2010:Q1 smartphone sales which became available just days ago. Of course, most of the smartphones sold by Nokia and RIM in the first quarter allow for installation of apps such as Facebook, Ovi Maps, etc., etc.Reply

“…Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. This is utter nonsense.”

All you have to do is to look at the developer space. How many app developers are creating apps for the unreleased RIM OS 6? … for the Symbian OS^3, due out in “select” markets sometime in Q3?

If older apps work OK in these new OS incarnations, and if Blackberry and Nokia users are heavy app downloaders (or for some reason will become heavy users), then the current sales-share leaders are relevant, but still not dominant, in the future of app phones.Reply

I'm curious about the PCI bus requirement for Windows 7 that would prevent it from running on Moorestown devices. Does it have something to do with storage, maybe? I'm having trouble finding specifics online as well. If someone could enlighten me, it would be appreciated.Reply

This is almost certainly a factor of windows being a monolithic kernel and MS not having any way to say "this PC doesn't do PCI". This is something that MS will have to deal with in the medium term future anyway. PCI slots are going away from some high end mobos; it's only a matter of time before they disappear from mainstream boards and stop being used to attach misc controllers like PATA (slowly going away entirely) or FireWire (FW3200 will need PCIe bandwidth). At that point intel will want to take it out of their chipsets as a cost saving feature, and oems will not be happy if they have to install a PCIe to PCI bridge to maintain windows compatibility.Reply

Maybe HP/Palm should get with Intel and optimize WebOS for this. Much of the WebOS stack is just Linux, Webkit, plus other F/OSS stuff like gstreamer and the like so I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't as big an effort as, say, Symbian or anything like that.

This could be a big break for Intel and HP/Palm, since HP/Palm needs something big to help it move on to the next WebOS device, and the OS could certainly see some benefits to more CPU power. I've heard the overclocking patches raising the CPU to 800MHz can really help things. Reply

After 6 hours, Phone B's battery is dead. How much use do you get out of a phone with a dead battery? 0.

999GHz x 0 is still... 0!

This push toward faster phones, without even considering battery life, is nuts. Phones are impractical tools for just about everything, but calling, messaging and photographs. None of these are CPU intensive. Dependability is more important than how fast the dial screen opens.

Moorestown may include better power architecture, but it throws this away by jacking up the processor speed.

Lets get back to practicality and make phones functional again. This push toward cutesy 1000mAH/1GHz+ phones that die in a few hours is moronic.

Actually, at least on Verizon, there are not many phones that last more than 2-3 days with relatively light use (5-10 min talk, 20-30 txt per day). This is actually something that has gone down in the past few years, as even basic phones get flashier UIs and use more power to run them. And while I support having some phones with weeklong standby time, I am fine with charging my phone or switching batteries every night so long as the phone can last a day in moderate use, which the Snapdragon phones typically can. I like to be able to access more than talk and text on the go.Reply

WOW... standing ovation... All of my Droid friends are laughable! Constantly tethered to a power outlet! Always doing something useless and for sure entertainment Vs thinking quietly with their minds... pretty soon "dude I gotta go, my phone is about to die," yeah umm just how many hours have your spent actually TALKING on the dang thing vs playing around with it constantly like some personalized TOY?

Battery life should be much more focused upon... The cattle-minded consumers are at it again; now tell me, had to only have 1 car, would you also buy a car that gets the WORST miles per gallon, but has a bunch of silly go-fast features that have you constantly at the fuel pump Vs getting to where you need/should be? Course that's why people usually own 2 cars to separate those needs Vs desires.... Today's "Ferrari" phones have the everyday idiot rambling along, bumping into shit, with their heads constantly fixated on the "screen," like drones. Talking...(?) haha you rarely see people talking with these things, it's just constant "entertainment," even in the most hindering places and social situations. So everyone's got a "Ferrari" phone, but end up trying to use it like a honda; sorry it just doesn't work like that. Faster = more fuel, LESS actual usefulness.__I'd rather have a phone with a decent amount of enjoyable features, that I can actually take with me on a trip to places that may or may not have power ON-DEMAND lol..Reply

The article and the new product is really interesting, but intel aint ready yet for smartphones, actually this moorestown platform looks much more interesting for pads and handhelds, having more space for such amount of chips, also being x86 with a custom linux. something like an ipad powered by this kind of atom starts to make sense, both from the performance and the battery lifeReply

The interesting thing about all of the power draw figures given is that they were for workloads wherethe ATOM would be doing almost nothing. Video decode is done by the video decode HW where theatom might wake up every few seconds to load the next batch of data, similarly for audio playback andtalk time (as you point out cellular modem is the only thing doing work). The thing that gets closest is web browsing, but assuming they are browsing 'static' pages (i.e. no Flash) the atom does a bit of work and probably sits essentially idle for easily 90% of the time.

So it's not surprising they are in the same ballpark as other SOC's for those workloads since they seem to essentially be using the same HW blocks as the competing SOC's. I think it's very telling that all of the power consumption figures from Intel were for essentially non-Atom work loads.

To which you might say "so what?" if those are the work flows that you care about, but that would ignore the fact that the whole point of the atom is to enable "fancy" UI's (and perhaps games) with lots of animation and stuff happening in the background and actually making use of the power of an ATOM.If you can't actually power the ATOM for an hour of actual use (browsing contacts, checking flights, web pages with Flash ads etc) won't the smart phone be almost worthless?Reply

Anand, Cortex A8 on the 65 nm feature size is reported to use about 0.59 mW per MHz under load, and Cortex A8 on the 45 nm feature size is reported to use 20-30% less than that. For a little bit of added beliveability, Qualcomm's Snapdragon sips in the vicinity of 0.5 mW per MHz on the 65 nm scale, though that may be under optimal circumstances / marketing spin.

Ultimately it's roughly half the power consumption Moorestown is reporting. And we notice that nowhere does Intel actually compare their power consumption figures to ARM's.

Additionally, I was under the impression that the A4 had a dual-channel memory controller. I would guess LPDDR2 memory as well, but your guess is as good as mine.

I suspect the S5L8930 in the A4 is a PA Semi (remember Apple bought them) reworked Samsung S5PV210, the dual-channel controller tablet / MID-oriented sister chip to the Samsung Hummingbird S5PC110 (which uses a single-channel controller with LPDDR2 support, if my resources are to be trusted.)Reply